A Daughter's Memoir



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by Natasha Trethewey

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An extremely personal account of violence, both the racial and gender sort, in one woman's life and the lingering effects. Trethewey's mother suffered through an abusive relationship, hers more physically abusive, while her daughter suffered severe emotional abuse at the hands of the same man. No matter that Trethewey's mother notified the police, and had a patrol officer in the area on the very day she was murdered. Trethewey recounts the fallout from her mother's murder and the fallout from existing as a bi-racial child in the south. She reconnects with her mother's ghost after the officer who was first on the scene gives her the case file years later, and works through her own identity at the same time. An Obama recommended book from 2020, and highly recommended by the Dawg. ( )
blackdogbooks | Apr 4, 2021 |
Memorial Drive - Natasha Tretheway
5 stars
“Scientists tell us there are different ways that the brain records and stores memory, that trauma is inscribed differently than other types of events.”
Briefly stated, this is a memoir of a family tragedy. Natasha Tretheway’s mother was murdered by her stepfather when Tretheway was nineteen. That event is foreshadowed in everything she relates of her earlier childhood; her parent’s marriage, their divorce, her experience as a mixed race child during the early days of southern desegregation.
Tretheway is a poet. Last year, I was moved by her grief stricken poems in Monument: Poems New and Selected. The trauma and grief are also present in this memoir, but there’s also a certain detachment. She speaks of selective memory and the ways that humans process trauma. She quotes Robert Frost when describing the value of metaphor, beyond the written word, but in understanding a life. She selects childhood memories and describes dreams that go beyond a statement of the stark facts of a violent event. The prose is moving and thought provoking.
This is a book about the murder of her young mother and her own lifetime of processing that trauma. It is about domestic abuse and its worst consequences. It is also a book about racism. Tretheway was born in 1966. The times may have been changing, but the racism is there. All of the time.
You can read her poem, Imperatives for Carrying on in the Aftermath at poetryfoundation.org . ( )
msjudy | Feb 21, 2021 |
The mother of poet, Natasha Trethewey was murdered in the parking lot of her apartment on Memorial Dr. in Atlanta in 1985 and this beautifully written book is the poet's attempt to come to terms with not only her murder, but also the life with an abusive husband that led to her killing. It is also a poignant story of the love between a mother and a daughter, and the many, many legal inequities that keep women from being protected from violent men.
That Trethewey has emerged from the horror of her early life is a testament to both her strength and her creative powers. ( )
etxgardener | Jan 22, 2021 |
This is a hard read and thus should be read. The memories around her mother, including the fictitious and missing memories make this very powerful. ( )
WiebkeK | Jan 21, 2021 |
I feel bad for Natasha Trethewey and her family for the terrible murder that stole away her mother much too early in her life, but I never fully connected with this book. I knew I was in trouble when the first sentence kicked off a dream sequence. It's one of several throughout the book, and I just could not overcome my knee-jerk negative reaction against that literary device, my biggest pet peeve as a reader.
The book is about half the author describing the circumstances of her mother's murder (including extended transcripts of phone conversations between the mother and the murderer) and half processing her emotions regarding that loss (including an extended sequence of a visit to a psychic). Either the balance was off or the book was too short, because I found myself wanting to know more about her mother and how the events effected her mother's other child, Joey Grimmette. It seems weird that he disappears from the book when the murder occurs. I know the book is about the author's journey, but this omission points to the focus as perhaps being too narrow.
I don't regret reading the book, but I don't think I'd recommend it to others. ( )
villemezbrown | Jan 13, 2021 |
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Epigraph
The past beats inside me like a second heart. - John Banville, The Sea
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. - Martin Buber
Dedication
In memory of the women who made me:
FRANCES DIXON INGRAHAM
LERETTA DIXON TURNBOUGH
and
GWENDOLYN ANN TURNBOUGH (NÈE),
my mother
First words
Three weeks after my mother is dead I dream of her: We walk a rutted path, an oval track around which we are making our slow revolution: side by side, so close our shoulders nearly touch, neither of us speaking, both of us in our traces.
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For several miles we'd drive like that: so close we seemed conjoined, and I could feel her heart beating against me as if I had not one, but two.
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Anecdotal Truths :

In this profoundly honest and examined memoir about returning to Iowa to care for her ailing parents, the star of Orange Is the New Black and bestselling author of Born with Teeth takes us on an unexpected journey of loss, betrayal, and the transcendent nature of a daughter’s love for her parents. Recommended by Phoebe Judge on her podcast Criminal, Molly Brodak's Bandit is memoir about fathers and daughters, family secrets, and single-parent homes. Brodak's father, Joe, was a larger-than-life figure in their blue-collar Michigan community, the son of Polish immigrants who was born in a Nazi refugee camp, and then came to the United. Click to read more about Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir by Natasha Trethewey. LibraryThing is a cataloging and social networking site for booklovers.

This is what I know about Charles Payne, my father. His handwriting was like calligraphy, all loops and flying ribbons that distracted from the intention of the words. He preferred complex and impressive words to simple language,

I have proof of this fact, There were several letters sent to us in hs initial seven year absence from our lives. The letters were read aloud to my brother, Stephen, two years my senior, and to me. Mom read, her voice laced with disdain and in exaggerated, theatrical enunciation of his words. He’d written :

“1963 has seen me subject to a number of serious m-e-t-a-m-o-r-p-h-i-s-m-s, each with attendant furious manifestations of my own reactions thereto”

Lana Turner. A Daughter's Memoir Movie

Jesus Christ ! He is crazy”. my mother shouted as she shook the envelope and abused the letter decorated in word ribbons. “Can you believe this crap?” She then attacked the envelope it was mailed in, also beautifully calligraphed and sent via Air Mail from Fontainebleau Boulevard, Miami Beach, Florida, her flailing, looping arms ironically mimicking his handwriting.

I thought it special that the letter had traveled from my imagined pink and green paradise of Miami Beach to our drab and cold rented railroad flat in the Bronx. I imagined flamingoes carrying the letter to a mailbox. Never mind that. She shook it furiously at its opened side edge, trying to dislodge the check she hoped for. I watched silently, waiting for a cue. At eight or ten years old, I was never sure. Should I laugh, comfort, shout or just remain silent? I always chose silence. In silence I could recall and try to reconcile the only image I had of him in my mind. That image, imprinted when I was three years old , was of a sandy-haired man sitting in a chair, nothing more. My mother seemed to approve of silence in all things “Charles” related. That silence was tacit and persistent. It lasted most of my life. I remained unsure of how to react or to feel about him well beyond childhood. He was part of myself that was missing without an awareness of ever having been missed.

The Bronx Is Home:

I loved the smell of Bronx in Summer. Blazing hot August days on city pavement is an amalgam of hot tar, day-old garbage, and cement wet down by afternoon thunderstorms or a building superintendent’s hosing away fine , gray, gritty dirt in roiled streams. It smells better to me even now than pine-scented woods or briny, fish -scented ocean. It will always smell like home. The visual images are comely and dynamic. They are not of graceful boughs of Hemlocks dancing in a breeze or rippling waves at the water’s edge. My memories are of bare teenage knees bumping against other knees to the rhythms on a portable radio. Stoop-sitting endlessly until standing or walking was necessary to allow old people to pass or to walk to a candy store. Our language was mostly body language. There was a twilight parade of old people, bent over two-armed wrestlers with a cane in one hand and a webbed, aluminum folding chair in the other. Their time to socialize seemed to coincide with sunset. Did they understand their timing was perfectly matched to the dwindling warmth and daylight beyond that of the sun? We yielded the front stoop to them so they could whisper about us and turn their heads in unison as we paraded past them going nowhere in particular. Old ladies in their faded cotton housecoats and carpenter aprons were judge and jury for fray-edged too short shorts and halter tops. It was the finest summer resort on earth. It was a blend of soft whispers behind hands and insistent, in and out sounds of rock and roll. It was the crisp, strutting dance of bare legs and sandaled feet on sidewalk blocks, and the slow motion folding or unfolding of flimsy chairs by gnarled fingers. It was the lifted leg of a little dog adding its own scent and sound against a fire hydrant. It was home.

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My brother’s mindset was cured cement when it came to his father. By contrast, I was bright green moss crowning through Winters frost. Resilient, yielding and eager to fill and encroach upon any dark and unlikely space available. Like moss, wanting only a modest claim and space to survive in. I was eager to explore the unknown landscape occupied by men called Dad. The seven year gap in his presence forgotten as I considered the physical likeness we shared, revealed on the very first meeting only months before. I was timid and unaccustomed to being the daughter of a man, any man, even one I looked so much like. Here was a man who looked like me and claimed an interest in knowing me. Our interests were evenly matched. Adobe flash player standalone downloadpartnersclever.

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But now, I understand that a huge crevasse in time and space is not simply bridged by wishing. Even tenacious moss that hopefully clings is never really a part of the rock.